The original Silk Road has been down for some months, but that hasn’t stopped the internet’s vast collection of dodgy sellers from setting up shop in a second market place. While the creatively named Silk Road 2 seemed to flourish for a while, it was reported this week that a hacking attack has claimed $2.7 million worth of Bitcoin.

A Silk Road 2 moderator going by the name of Defcon reported in an online forum that the marketplace had been hacked and the site’s escrow account emptied. The escrow service was used by the site to facilitate the transfer of Bitcoins between buyers and sellers; there were around 4474 Bitcoins in the account when the attack took place.

According to reports, the hackers responsible for the Silk Road 2 attack exploited a vulnerability within the transaction process to clean out the entire collection of Bitcoins.  The hackers made use of the Silk Road’s automatic transaction verification system to place orders from one another and then request refunds to automatically receive money back.